#mo fuzz

Here’s to more fun, more adventures and more debauchery this year. 🍻 My motto for 2016: “Let’s get into trouble, baby.” - Mo Fuzz, Tapeheads (Don Cornelius with John Cusack)

My old band, Mo Fuzz, was briefly a shining star in the early '90s Chicago music scene, recording an album with Steve Albini and then imploding. The Wikipedia entry was deleted, but it still makes me laugh: Mo Fuzz was a Chicago post-punk band (1989-1993) known for both its irreverence and odd sense of showmanship. Often classed as performance art as much as music, Mo Fuzz was a popular live act for a period of several years, opening for bands as varied as Helmet and Laughing Hyenas. After recording a single album, The Great Unwashed, with Steve Albini (released on Lunch Money Records) the band imploded. The band's influential combination of childlike wonder (often emphasized by the waif-like presence of their lead singer Crush't Velour), buzzing guitars and faux serious attitude was a brief, if noteworthy, presence on the local Chicago music scene. History: Started by a group of purposefully anonymous college students, Mo Fuzz was named after a character in the cult film Tapeheads, played by SoulTrain host Don Cornelius. The band first rose to local prominence with the release of the single "Over My Shoulder" as part of the local Chicago Niteskool Project compilation series. An elaborate video mocking Michael Jackson's Thriller and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was produced by Northwestern University's School of Speech, and was shown on MTV's Basement Tapes. The song also received airplay on local radio, including both Q101 and WXRT. Writeups in Maximum Rocknroll[8]and other fanzines built a base of fans large enough to sell several hundred tickets to their shows at the height of their popularity. The band's live shows were often surreal affairs, with a large stuffed bear and a variety of blow-up toys used as props. Album: The band's one album, "The Great Unwashed," was an unconventional mix of Killing Joke, Bauhaus and Siouxsie and The Banshees. Albini's engineering provided a claustrophobic feel to the songs, which live often felt more upbeat. Two songs stood out as different, however -- "Anthem" included an elegiaic string section, and sounded almost like a piece of chamber pop. Similarly, a punk rock version of "Mongoloid" by Devo hinted at a more aggressive tone. The album was also notable for its use of radical photography in the cover art by local artists including Ken Fandell. Immediately following the release of their debut album, the band broke up and the album faded from view in the absence of promotion, though it has recently developed a cult following. At the band's final show at the Metro in Chicago, the oversized stuffed bear was ritually disemboweled, filling the club with sytrofoam and plastic hair. The current whereabouts of the band members are unknown. Attitude: A classic example of the Mo Fuzz attitude (also displayed in a variety of interviews in local media) can be found in the press release distributed with their album The Great Unwashed, purportedly composed by Chicago newspaper legend Irv Kupcinet: "As Howard Jones once said to me, "Kup, you can't live your life in one day." And so it is with Mo Fuzz. The lives of the poets do tell us something of Mo Fuzz (Petrarch describes them as "smooth love rolling backwards down your tongue," though he may have been speaking of something entirely different). Yet not even Spiro Agnew, in his classic treatise "Jonesing with Ian MacKaye," could have foreseen the awesome, colon numbing power that Mo Fuzz now provides to the metropolitan Chicago area, having replaced Commonwealth Edison as the single largest consumer of U-235 in the midwestern United States. Mo Fuzz contains the following ingredients (names are changed to protect you from their real names, which are uniformly boring and unRock): Crush't Velour: songstress, lover of soft, broken things, powermad viper, and owner of far too many brownie uniforms from her youth -- each of which still fits her perfectly. She rides the hood ornament of this death machine, and as initial target of all objects thrown from the audience, she suffers from being "punch drunk" most of the time, leaving her with inclinations towards performance art when not on stage. Beloved by children, she is currently starring in "Clarrissa Explains It All For You" on Nickolodeon. The Iguana: Guitar. A former equestiran coach at an all-girls junior college in Virginia. Sure, it was fun, but he wouldn't do it again. El Presidente: Drummist, C.P.A., J.D., M.B.A, M.B.E, is currently working towards an M.D./Ph.d in cerebral oncology. Having studied tribal drumming with two of the five drummers for the Ramones in Tunisia, El Presidente has an almost mystical ability to devour rhythms and spit them up in deformed, slightly disturbing forms, often with saliva still dripping from the third beat of every measure. A playboy of some repute, he is often known to sally forth with as many as nine women on his arm, a fact which has lengthened his arms considerably and aids in his "wrap around" drumming style wherein his arms encircle each drum while he pounds them with his tongue. Truly remarkable. "I saw him play once," said John Bonham, smoking a cod in a long, green bong. "I feared to watch yet I could not turn away." M. Superlatif: Master of natural law and former clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, M. Superlatif is a classic underachiever. Thought to be a prodigy when young, M.Superlatif was later diagnosed with "alienation," and institutionalized at the Burt Lance Hospital For the Terminally Bewildered. M.Superlatif's bass playing and gorgeous countertenor accent a wonderful figure and enormous feet. Often playing a custom made twelve string bass, M.Superlatif adds a certain je nais se quois to the proceedings, if you catch my drift. Their new album, recorded by some fellow who badly needs to be fed a good meal once in awhile, is the strongest dose of Kaopectate you've ever tried, baby. And you can hum it, too. It will make you cry with the soothing "Anthem." It will make you stomp around the room like a diabetic wildebeest with the driving "Window." And it will leave you spayed and neutered by the insipid "Crotchsaw." You will not forget Mo Fuzz or The Great Unwashed, in the same way that you are unlikely to forget an endoscopy. That, by the way, is a good thing. Listen. Learn. Don't be frightened. That which does not kill you makes you stronger. And as Foucault once said to David Yow, "Love is a many splendored thing." --Irv Kupcinet"